Hacker News Reader

lr4444lron Warren Buffett steps down as Berkshire Hathaway CEO after six decades

People with a lot less economic knowledge than Buffet still understand that another Depression could easily render them jobless and unable to pay a mortgage on a cheaper house. Wishing for a housing market downturn is not the same as a widescale GDP pullback.

lr4444lron I rebooted my social life

Find something you need their help with that forces them out of the house. Depressed people often lack purpose.

lr4444lron Warren Buffett steps down as Berkshire Hathaway CEO after six decades

I respect Buffett greatly on a professional level, and think it's the height of arrogance to believe any one of us personally has the moral right to decide which level of lawful activity becomes turpitudinous greed.

THAT SAID...

My uncle (he's 98) had a passing acquaintance with Buffett during their overlap at Penn, and in the one econ class they shared, he remarked having heard Buffett say in almost salivating eagerness as he rubbed his hands that if only there could be another Great Depression, he would make a killing. The dude has value investing in his DNA beyond anything else, I truly believe. But he's argued for changing complex and unfair taxation, and always been a good citizen as far as I can tell. I think if all of Wall Street were like him, the world would be a much better place.

lr4444lron The future of software development is software developers

> After working with agent-LLMs for some years now, I can confirm that they are completely useless for real programming. > They never helped me solve complex problems with low-level libraries. They can not find nontrivial bugs. They don't get the logic of interwoven layers of abstractions.

This was how I felt until about 18 months ago.

Can you give a single, precise example where modern day LLMs fail as woefully as you describe?

lr4444lron Weight loss jabs: What happens when you stop taking them

People also are often unaware that the symptoms of asthma which cause the most concern (dyspnea, tightness, etc.) are less hypoxia and more hypercapnia. Hypoxia in normal people does not feel like breathlessness: it's lightheadedness, low energy, turning blue, etc. Asthma is almost definitionally airway hyper-responsiveness (and relevant structural changes): any fitness intervention that can help improve CO2 expulsion will probably greatly help an asthmatic seek relief. This is also why in acute attacks, pursed lip exhalations can really help.

lr4444lron Weight loss jabs: What happens when you stop taking them

As someone with asthma, let me tell you that they _do_ need to get into better shape to breathe better. Part of that is a medically proven practice called pulmonary rehabilitation, but also, regular cardiovascular exercise at different intensities and direct training of the abdominal muscles has a marked improvement both on pulmonary function (to a limit, but even more important as you age) and oxygen utilization from the reduced pulmonary function. Finally, both acid and laryngeal reflux are silent contributors to asthma by introducing acid and pepin into the airways, and weight loss can improve the symptoms of those.

lr4444lron Weight loss jabs: What happens when you stop taking them

Question for people who have trouble losing fat (this was never my problem): have you ever tried instead of dieting to just force yourself to eat more fruits, vegetables, and protein daily while also allowing yourself free range in the remaining appetite room to have whatever? The human mind/brain/whatever doesn't do well with deprivation of a high dopamine reward, but what would happen if you started to shift your tastes by insisting that it get used to a more healthful diet as a precursor to getting what it wants?

I ask this because when I was younger, I also had tastebuds warped by hyper-palatable foods, but after incrementally getting my diet to such a clean and optimized place, I literally feel bad even while chewing and tasting something like a donut, heavily salted and oiled potato chips, or candy. It's probably like how I would have felt if I literally mixed a tablespoon of oil and sugar or salt together and swallowed it.

Is it that hard to shift the system toward better habits by incremental introduction of better ones, and crowding out the bad? Exercise helps here, because once you begin to enjoy fitness, you get a stronger feedback loop with the bad food creating bad outcomes.

lr4444lron Stop crawling my HTML – use the API

Create a static resource inside a script tag whose GET request immediately flags the IP for a blocklist.

lr4444lron Don't be a scary old guy: My 40s survival strategy with charm

Decent advice. Also, get fit.

lr4444lron After my dad died, we found the love letters

People are rarely anything less than complicated.

lr4444lron Checkout.com hacked, refuses ransom payment, donates to security labs

... that we know of. Perhaps some of those "outages" were compromised systems.

lr4444lron Montana becomes first state to enshrine 'right to compute' into law

It's a nice gesture, but I'm not sure it will matter. AI is likely already on the Federal radar for superseding regulation.

lr4444lron Oldest woman to finish Ironman World Championship in Kona

Grabow worked as a software engineer.

Just when I thought she couldn't be even more awesome.

lr4444lron Oldest woman to finish Ironman World Championship in Kona

The toll that children and grandchildren (by caretaking, which is common) take on a human female is significant, so yes.

lr4444lron Why aren't smart people happier?

... until the CNS homeostasis stops responding to them, which is why they keep taking bigger hits. Something more complex is going on.

lr4444lron Why aren't smart people happier?

Are you not aware that many psych drugs that modify brain chemistry fail to work for people? Even when they are tested to have adequate or high levels?

lr4444lron New gel restores dental enamel and could revolutionise tooth repair

Many people are not honest about how much they floss, and those who do often don't floss correctly. We have a well understood mechanism for how tooth decay and gingivitis happen, and it's clear clinically that flossing can address these more effectively than brushing alone can. Furthermore, the subjective reduction in bad breath means harmful oral bacteria are reduced, which could have benefits beyond oral health.

lr4444lron Tech workers' fight for living wages and a 32-hour workweek is a battle for all

When it comes to jobs where the skill growth and knowledge domain is fairly static and is hard on the body or dangerous, like the trades, I think these demands are a good idea.

Not so much in IT. I've seen too many public sector tech employees atrophy and fall way behind in their skill set and productivity. Most would hardly make it past an initial tech screening at a startup or FAANG. I think it's great that those guys have a union to protect them, but we cannot run the entire industry this way and expect to keep the economic engine of these companies going.

lr4444lron Vitamin D reduces incidence and duration of colds in those with low levels

Do we really know what "optimal" vitamin D levels are? I've heard a wide range of answers on this, and it's not even clear to me that we know whether there is natural human variability in the amount needed.

lr4444lron Poison, Poison Everywhere

You should read their methodology. For one, they are entirely subscriber supported. Secondly, they send out people to buy the product at random stores off the shelf, not solicit manufacturers to send possibly biased batches. Thirdly, manufacturers often write in to them when they receive bad reviews, urging a retest. (The back and forth of those letters gets published.)

Sure, it could all be a hoax. But we don't have too many alternatives.

lr4444lron Poison, Poison Everywhere

Independent lab testing for contaminants and actual active ingredient levels vs. what's stated. They also publish summaries of studies on the active ingredients that test the effectiveness against claimed therapeutic value. (It's depressing how few studies actually show benefit over placebo.)

lr4444lron Poison, Poison Everywhere

This is precisely why I happily pay for an annual subscription to ConsumerLab[0]. It's largely just for supplements and a few functional foods, but with a tiny staff they are doing more work to help the public on the unregulated medicine market than the entire FDA, IMHO.

[0]https://www.consumerlab.com/

lr4444lron The Dragon Hatchling: The missing link between the transformer and brain models

I mean look how we treat each other--we can't even treat beings we know to be conscious with kindness and compassion. Mix our immaturity with a newfound ability to create digital life and it'll be the greatest ethical disaster of all time.

Or maybe if we had artificial life to abuse, it would be a suffcient outlet for our destructive and selfish impulses so that we would do less of it to genuine life. Maybe it's just an extension of sport contests that scratch that tribal itch to compete and win. There are no easy answers to these questions.

lr4444lron Doing well in your courses: Andrej's advice for success (2013)

Even if you're not allowed to bring it to the exam. Writing things down helps. What you want is to cram the entire course on 1 or more pages that you can in the end tile in front of you and say with high degree of confidence "This is exactly everything I must know"

Reminds me of this comedy bit in an American sitcom from about 35 years ago where the dumb kid when asked how his history test said it went okay but admitted he cheated. He explained that he tried to write down everything on his arm, there was not enough room despite multiple attempts at it. Then he realized he was starting to remember some of the content after the several rewrites, and said "so I just did it that way! I hid it all in my head and it was great! The professor didn't even know that I was cheating because there was no evidence!"

lr4444lron The great software quality collapse or, how we normalized catastrophe

Software is also pumped out now at a faster rate than ever, runs on commodity hardware, is delivered digitally, often run on platforms that can force near real-time user updates, with much higher complexity.

Eventually we will hit hard physical limits that require we really be "engineers" again, but throughput is still what matters. It's still comparatively great paying profession with low unemployment, and an engine of economic growth in the developed world.

lr4444lron Inflammation now predicts heart disease more strongly than cholesterol

Prednisone and other corticosteroids. They are not good to use long term for many reasons.

There is no free lunch or magic bullet (yet) to health. We're all going to die.

lr4444lron Man still alive six months after pig kidney transplant

Pigs are already helping out with lung transplantation[0]. It's a ways off from where this kidney trial is, but very promising.

[0] https://www.theguardian.com/science/2025/aug/25/surgeons-tra...

lr4444lron Why do we remember some life moments but not others?

Isn't this obvious? Anyone who was old enough to remember 9/11 whom I've spoken to can recall several mundane aspects of that day.

lr4444lron Why, as a responsible adult, SimCity 2000 hits differently

I have no knowledge of what this Dutch effort was beyond the info in your link, but nothing suggests that the public outcry was go actually ban vehicles or disincentivize ownership and use with tactics such as with higher fees, reduced parking availability, which is what U.S. urban road safety advocates I see pushing for.

lr4444lron U.S. investors, Trump close in on TikTok deal with China

Thank you for saying this. The American Christian Right's staunch pro-Israel voting bloc is way underappreciated by most critics of the lobby money. These people are legion, and would not vote against Israel if you paid them: it's part of their Christian messianic religion that the Jews be in the Holy Land.